The gunmen who attacked Mumbai must have really done their homework to identify the Leopold Cafe.

The Leopold's is over a century old, but of late it has become symbolic of Mumbai's edgy, fashionable image, after featuring in the pages of bestsellers and guidebooks. It found a new popularity among creative types, expatriate workers and many an investment banker wanting an atmospheric after-work beer alongside the Lonely Planet set.

It's unclear who exactly perpetrated yesterday's atrocities. But whether al-Qaida or the Deccan Mujahideen, these men knew that their targets had a deep symbolic resonance: as hangouts for the legion of adventurous foreigners and the new Indian elite. In recent years, they've flocked to Mumbai as never before, attracted by the project to re-make India's commercial capital as a global hub to rival Shanghai, New York or London.

Mumbai's remarkable urban transformations, its mocha cafes and converted warehouse nightclubs, have not happened by chance. Five years ago, the port city once known as Bombay paid the management consultants McKinsey and Co to produce "Vision Mumbai" – a blueprint to become a world-class city by 2013.

I got my first taste of just how audacious the project is exactly a year ago, while strolling around the narrow lanes of Dharavi, reputedly Asia's largest slum, on the first of many visits to produce BBC radio documentaries. The dense lanes of shanties and shacks are home to up to a million souls, a multiethnic patchwork of untouchables and Muslims at the bottom rungs of the city's social ladder.

Now, the entire slum is set for demolition by private companies. The aim is to free up land for the commercial development of multinationals and retail.

Many locals are unhappy because, despite getting free flats in tower blocks on site, they fear being pushed out by gentrification. "In this Mumbai, they don't want the poor man," I was told by Raju Korde, a local political activist.

The slum itself has suffered the fallout of terrorist attacks in the past. In fact, the grief and horror of yesterday are a sadly familiar tale to many Mumbaikars – including the 60% who live in slums or informal housing. Earlier episodes like the train bombings of 2006, and the coordinated attacks of 1993, each claimed even more lives than Wednesday's atrocities. The prelude to the 1993 bombs was rioting by ethnic Maharashtran Hindu nationalists, and the slum began to polarise between Hindus and Muslims, who separated into different areas.

But that domestic faultline was not the target on Wednesday. Instead, it's precisely the elite infrastructure of the "global city" that the terrorists attacked.

In other words, what's different about Wednesday is that it seems to be Mumbai's connection to globalisation – its connection to us – that made it a target. Indeed, Britons and Americans, as well as a Jewish centre, were, it appears, deliberately sought out. Undermining Mumbai's attractiveness as a global destination and financial centre, at a time of a worldwide credit crunch and vulnerability, was perhaps the point of the attacks.

Mumbai's choice to go "global" was made at least partly under the west's tutelage. As Mumbai suffers, the world must acknowledge how much the city has worked to become part of a global economy. The terrorists certainly have.